President Barack Obama used a speech in Berlin on Wednesday to call on Russia to revive the push for a world without nuclear arms by agreeing to target further reductions of up to one third of deployed nuclear weapons.

Speaking in Berlin where John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan gave rousing Cold War speeches, Obama urged Russia to help build on the “New START” treaty that requires both countries to cut stockpiles of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,550 each by 2018.

“After a comprehensive review I have determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies, and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent, while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one third,” he said.

“I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures,” Obama said at the Brandenburg Gate, which once stood alongside the Berlin Wall that divided the communist east and the capitalist west.

But Republicans quickly warned that the cuts Obama is contemplating would put the United States at greater risk as rogue nations like North Korea and Iran seek to build larger arsenals. Moreover, allies like Japan may move to build their own arsenals as they determine they can no longer depend on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

“Our experience has been that nuclear arsenals — other than ours — are on the rise,” said Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, pointing to Iran and North Korea.

“A country whose conventional military strength has been weakened due to budget cuts ought not to consider further nuclear force reductions while turmoil in the world is growing.”

Sen. Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said any additional limitations of the U.S. nuclear arsenal without first fulfilling commitments to modernization of existing forces could amount to “unilateral disarmament.”

“Maintaining a strong nuclear deterrent is vital for our nation’s security and that of our allies around the world. While the administration has assured me that no further reductions will occur outside of treaty negotiations and the advice and consent of the Senate, the president’s announcement without first fulfilling commitments on modernization could amount to unilateral disarmament,” Corker said.

“The president should follow through on full modernization of the remaining arsenal and pledges to provide extended nuclear deterrence before engaging in any additional discussions,” Corker told Bloomberg News.

In April, Corker pointed out the Obama administration’s unmet obligations on nuclear modernization in a joint commentary with Inhofe published by Foreign Policy. And in a previous op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, also with Inhofe, Corker argued unilateral disarmament by the United States could lead to the “very instability that the U.S. seeks to avoid.”

“I’m sure you remember last year when the president discussed with [then-Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev about how he could do more after the election when he wouldn’t be seeking re-election? Now you know the rest of the story,” Fleischmann said.

“We live in a dangerous world and Russia has not complied with existing treaties. Russia also has an advantage in tactical nuclear weapons and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has not exhibited any credibility, as we have seen recently regarding Syria.”

Further cuts also are likely to embolden other non-nuclear states, including Japan, to consider building their own nuclear arsenals, analysts say.

“This is not the time to embark on such a dangerous path, with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasing their nuclear forces,” he said.

A U.S. official familiar with strategic nuclear policyalso told Newsmax in Maythat the delay in signing the implementation study may be the result of concerns among military commanders in charge of nuclear deterrence that China’s nuclear arsenal is expanding more rapidly than anticipated, and that Russia and other nuclear states, including Pakistan and North Korea, are modernizing their forces.

“I hear increasing concerns about China,” the official said. “We really don’t know what they’re doing and what decisions are being made” about China’s nuclear-force modernization.

Obama’s vision of a “world without nuclear weapons” set out in a speech in Prague in 2009, three months into his presidency, earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. But his mixed results so far have fueled criticism that the prize may have been premature.

Experts said reducing the nuclear arsenal makes strategic and economic sense. But Mark Fitzpatrick at the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Obama faces major obstacles “including a recalcitrant Russia and a reluctant Senate”.

President Vladimir Putin, speaking in St. Petersburg minutes before Obama’s speech, made no direct comment but voiced concern about U.S. missile defenses and high-precision weapons.

Moscow sees nuclear deterrents as the safeguard of national security. It is worried about the West’s superior conventional weapons and NATO plans for a missile defense system in Europe.

“High-precision conventional weapons systems are being actively developed. … States possessing such weapons strongly increase their offensive potential,” said Putin.

The chief of the Russian military’s general staff appears reluctant to negotiate a new nuclear deal, and Russian foreign policy expert Fyodor Lukyanov described Obama’s desire to “go to zero globally” as totally unacceptable in Russia.

Obama will also target reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Europe and host a summit in 2016 on securing nuclear materials and preventing nuclear terrorism. He hosted such a meeting in 2010, a second was held in Seoul in 2012, and Obama will attend a third in The Hague next year.

He met the Russian president this week at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland, where they signed a new agreement on securing nuclear material left over from the Cold War, replacing the 1992 Nunn-Lugar agreement that expired on Monday.

That was “the kind of constructive, cooperative relationship that moves us out of a Cold War mindset,” Obama said afterward.

Early initiatives of Obama’s presidency led to the New START treaty plus measures to bolster the Non-Proliferation Treaty and a new effort to secure nuclear materials worldwide, but that push has flagged in the face of political realities.

But Obama said the United States and Russia were on track to cut deployed nuclear warheads “to their lowest levels since the 1950s,” and said a framework was being forged to counter what he called Iran and North Korea’s “nuclear weaponisation.”

Iran denies it is seeking nuclear weapons.

Obama also wants to see negotiations on a treaty to end the production of fissile materials, which are necessary for a chain reaction of nuclear fission, for weapons.

Experts and advocacy groups described Obama’s initiative as “long overdue” and the reduction targets as modest.

“The one-third cuts outlined by the president are but 200 to 300 warheads fewer than the United States was prepared to agree to during the New START negotiations four years ago,” said Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association in Washington.

In “Democracy in America,” published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. “The inhabitant of the United States,” he wrote, “has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it.”

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. “In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.”

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

The decline of American associational life was memorably documented in Robert Puttnam’s seminal 1995 essay “Bowling Alone,” which documented the exodus of Americans from bowling leagues, Rotary clubs and the like. Since then, the downward trend in “social capital” has only continued. According to the 2006 World Values Survey, active membership even of religious associations has declined from just over half the population to little more than a third (37%). The proportion of Americans who are active members of cultural associations is down to 14% from 24%; for professional associations the figure is now just 12%, compared with more than a fifth in 1995. And, no, FacebookFB +0.54% is not a substitute.

Instead of joining together to get things done, Americans have increasingly become dependent on Washington. On foreign policy, it may still be true that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But when it comes to domestic policy, we all now come from the same place: Planet Government.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period.

The last time regulation was cut was under Ronald Reagan, when the number of pages in the Federal Register fell by 31%. Surprise: Real GDP grew by 30% in that same period. But Leviathan’s diet lasted just eight years. Since 1993, 81,883 new rules have been issued. In the past 10 years, the “final rules” issued by our 63 federal departments, agencies and commissions have outnumbered laws passed by Congress 223 to 1.

Right now there are 4,062 new regulations at various stages of implementation, of which 224 are deemed “economically significant,” i.e., their economic impact will exceed $100 million.

The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that’s on top of the federal government’s $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms.

Next year’s big treat will be the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, something every small business in the country must be looking forward to with eager anticipation. Then, as Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) warned readers on this page 10 months ago, there’s also the Labor Department’s new fiduciary rule, which will increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers; the EPA’s new Ozone Rule, which will impose up to $90 billion in yearly costs on American manufacturers; and the Department of Transportation’s Rear-View Camera Rule. That’s so you never have to turn your head around when backing up.

President Obama occasionally pays lip service to the idea of tax reform. But nothing actually gets done and the Internal Revenue Service code (plus associated regulations) just keeps growing—it passed the nine-million-word mark back in 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, meaning nearly 19% more verbiage than 10 years before. While some taxes may have been cut in the intervening years, the tax code just kept growing.

I wonder if all this could have anything to do with the fact that we still have nearly 12 million people out of work, plus eight million working part-time jobs, five long years after the financial crisis began.

Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming. Toward the end of “Democracy in America” he warned against the government becoming “an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . . cover[ing] [society’s] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way.”

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: “It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

If that makes you bleat with frustration, there’s still hope.

Mr. Ferguson’s new book “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die” has just been published by Penguin Press.

The IRS And Terrorists

June 19, 2013 by Kris Zane Americans were livid when they found out the IRS was targeting conservative groups—using endless questionnaires to demand donor lists, political and family connections, Facebook posts, event records, transcripts of speeches, and even the content of their prayers! The IRS then put these endless questionnaires in the circular file for up to three years, and some conservative groups—specifically Tea Party groups—are still waiting for a resolution to their applications. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the targeting of conservative groups had a two-fold purpose that had nothing to do with determining conservative groups’ tax status: 1. To keep Tea Party groups busy filling out paperwork instead of organizing in order to neutralize them until after the 2012 election. 2. To collect opposition research on Obama’s political enemies.

At the same time, not one single progressive group was targeted by the IRS. Not one single progressive group received endless questionnaires. Not one single progressive group had to wait years for a determination of their tax-exempt status, but were fast-tracked in a period of months. This included the Kenya-based Barack H. Obama Foundation headed by Obama’s half brother, Malik Obama. The Barack H. Obama Foundation was approved by none other than IRS poster girl Lois Lerner, personally approving it in a speedy thirty days! Lerner even went further, illegally backdating the application to 2008—a full three years—allowing them to keep the thousands of dollars they had illegally collected.

But this is mild compared to what the IRS has been engaged in. According to a report by WND.com, an even more egregious act by the IRS regards CAIR —the Council on American Islamic Relations—whose tax-exempt status was revoked in June of 2011. Despite having failed to file annual tax filings for multiple years, in June of 2012, during the height of the Obama administration’s IRS attack on conservatives, the IRS secretly reinstated CAIR’s tax-exempt status despite Congressional investigations of the shady so-called Muslim “outreach” group.

This is the same CAIR that was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008/2009 Holy Land Foundation terrorist-funding trial. The Holy Land Foundation, posing as a Palestinian charity, was a conduit for funneling millions of dollars to the terrorist group HAMAS, the sister organization of Muslim Brotherhood.

This is the same CAIR that the Obama administration allowed to literally purge hundreds of pages of classified FBI training materials of terms like “jihad” and “Islamist,” in order to remove any words that Obama felt included so-called “Islamaphobic” terms.

Why was a terrorist front group’s tax exempt status reinstated? Perhaps we should ask the Obama administration: CAIR has had literally hundreds of meetings with the State Department, the FBI, and yes, even the White House! A terrorist front group in the White House? Unbelievably, yes!

What does this tell us about an administration that targets conservative Americans who stand up for the Constitution, that love their country, and embraces an organization tied to terrorists, tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that has openly vowed to destroy the United States?

That Barack Hussein Obama is a traitor, that he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and thus there is only one solution: Impeach him now—today.

Inflation at 53-Year Low Gives Bernanke Time to Press on With QE

The lowest inflation since the brink of the Kennedy-era economic boom in the 1960s is buying time for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to press on with the central bank’s $85 billion in monthly bond purchases.

A gauge of consumer prices excluding food and energy that is watched by the Fed rose 1.1 percent in the year through April, matching the smallest gain since records started in 1960. With inflation below the Fed’s 2 percent long-run goal and the jobless rate at 7.6 percent, the Fed is falling short of its mandate to ensure stable prices and maximum employment.

Policy makers wrapping up a meeting will probably pledge to plow ahead with record bond buying, setting aside for now concern that growth in the Fed’s $3.41 trillion in assets may stoke long-term inflation expectations or disrupt market functioning, said Drew Matus, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“Why would they possibly rush to a taper now?” said Matus, an economist at UBS AG in Stamford, Connecticut. “Unemployment is still nowhere near what they consider to be the natural rate, and the inflation number is too low.”

The Federal Open Market Committee plans to release a statement at 2 p.m. after a two-day meeting in Washington, and Bernanke is scheduled to hold a press conference at 2:30 p.m. The central bank will also release FOMC participants’ forecasts for employment, growth, inflation and interest rates.

October Meeting

The Fed will probably wait to taper bond buying until its Oct. 29-30 meeting, when it will cut its monthly purchases to $65 billion, according to the median estimate in June 4-5 Bloomberg survey of 59 economists. By then, inflation will be rising toward the Fed’s target, accelerating to 1.3 percent in the third quarter and 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter, according to economists’ estimates.

“The low level of inflation gives them the room to do things on their own terms and do it relatively slowly, which seems to be an approach that they favor right now,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut, and a former Richmond Fed researcher.

Inflation will eventually speed up as long as the economy keeps growing, as newly hired workers stoke demand and support prices, said Nathan Sheets, the global head of international economics at Citigroup Inc. Unemployment will probably fall by the fourth quarter to 7.4 percent, according to a survey of 83 economists.

“The economy is on the cusp of picking up,” said Sheets, former head of the Fed’s international finance division. “If we get the recovery in the labor market, inflation is likely to follow.”

Policy makers have debated this year when to begin winding down bond purchases known as quantitative easing. The Fed announced $40 billion in monthly purchases of mortgage backed securities in September and added $45 billion of Treasury purchases in December. At the current pace, the Fed’s balance sheet will hit $4 trillion by year-end.

The FOMC has bought bonds to halt disinflation before, announcing in November 2010 a round of purchases of Treasury securities totaling $600 billion and aimed partly at averting a broad decline in prices.

Prices as measured by the personal consumption expenditures index haven’t fallen to the level in April since the period before an expansion that started in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy, according to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Price Expectations

Investor expectations for inflation have also declined. The spread between nominal Treasurys and inflation-protected securities over the next 10 years has narrowed to 2.09 percentage points from as high as 2.59 points in March.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said last week he wants “to see some reassurance” from inflation data “before we start to taper our asset purchase program.”

Other Fed officials see disinflation as less of a threat. William C. Dudley, president of the New York Fed, said in a May 23 interview that “inflation expectations are still well- anchored” and “are higher than the current rate of inflation, and so that’ll tend to pull inflation back upwards a little bit.”

Fed officials failed to foresee that inflation would fall so low. In September 2012, when they started $40 billion in monthly purchases of mortgage bonds, they predicted core inflation would climb 1.7 percent to 1.9 percent that year. Inflation finished 2012 at 1.4 percent.

Fed Forecasts

In December, Fed officials forecast core inflation this year would climb 1.6 percent to 1.9 percent. So far, the measure has risen 1.1 percent from a year earlier. Including food and energy, the personal consumption expenditures index, or PCE, in April climbed just 0.7 percent over 12 months.

A separate gauge of inflation, the consumer price index, climbed 1.4 percent in May from a year earlier, the Labor Department reported.

The gauge rose 0.1 percent in May from the month before after falling 0.4 percent in April. The median forecast of 82 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for an increase of 0.2 percent in May. The first drop in the cost of food in almost four years helped hold back prices.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, has cut prices on groceries and other necessities as the Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain’s lower-income shoppers pull back amid higher unemployment and increased Social Security taxes.

“We see some growth in beef and produce pricing, but that’s offset in our businesses by dry grocery, that’s flat to slightly deflating in certain areas,” Bill Simon, chief executive officer of the company’s U.S. operations, told analysts on a June 7 conference call. “We don’t expect those to change.”

World Bank: Fed Won’t Make ‘Short and Sharp’ Policy Switch

Wednesday, 19 Jun 2013 08:31 AM

The World Bank is concerned about the spillover effects on developing countries of a slowing of U.S. money creation and will move to provide affordable capital when borrowing costs rise, its president said on Wednesday.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has sparked a bout of financial market turmoil since its chief, Ben Bernanke, announced on May 22 that the Fed could, before the year is out, begin slowing the pace at which it creates dollars.

Emerging markets, the recipients of much of that money as it has been printed, have borne the brunt of investors taking fright.

“We’re constantly watching what the spillover effects are of these unconventional monetary policies on developing countries especially,” Jim Yong Kim told Reuters in an interview.

“If the United States does back off … and slows down its (asset-buying) quantitative easing, borrowing costs will go up and we think they will also go up for developing countries. And that’s a real concern.”

The Fed holds a policy meeting on Wednesday. Analysts expect it to keep options open about such a move later in the year following some mixed recent economic data.

Kim did not expect capital outflow from emerging markets on anything like the scale seen in the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Nor did he expect the Fed’s policy switch to be “short and sharp.”

“Ben Bernanke … has been a clear and steady voice on what’s needed,” he said.

But he conceded that a world economy awash with money created by central banks, and with Japan now embarking on an unprecedented stimulus program, was in “uncharted territory.”

“If the price of capital starts going up then we are going to have to move to find ways of creating new instruments for making capital available for infrastructure,” Kim said.

The bank is working on a global infrastructure facility to do that. Kim said middle income countries were prepared to invest because they knew World Bank involvement would “crowd in” private capital too.

“We think this is urgent so we are moving pretty aggressively,” he said. “As interest rates go up we have to work to provide capital at rates which make sense for developing countries.”

DERISKING

Kim said it was remarkable how many emerging economies recovered so quickly from the 2007-2009 world financial crisis.

“We think it’s because they made a lot of tough choices early on. They went through their fiscal consolidation, they looked at their public sector expenditures and rationalized them,” he said.

But equally remarkable is that in an era of ultra-low interest rates these countries could not get access to affordable long-term investment. “They’re saying we did all the right things … and yet we still don’t have access to capital,” Kim said.

“Just like in 2008, we have to be the countercyclical arm that is ready to move to soften the blow on the developing countries,” he said.

In the longer-term, the World Bank had a pivotal role to play in “derisking” infrastructure projects, particularly in Africa, so long-term private investors come in.

“Private sector investment is going to become such a huge part of our own strategy,” Kim said.

He cited the example of the Inga III dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo which he said had the potential to provide electricity for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa barring South Africa.

Yet international investors are understandably cautious about getting involved in a country which has been wracked with violence during a long insurgency.

The World Bank and United Nations were trying to create “a little cocoon around that project so that we can in fact attract institutional investors.”

“We have to find some way of creating a governance structure that would weather the vicissitudes of Democratic Republic of Congo politics. We think it’s possible,” Kim said. “So watch that space.”

The Miami Herald endorses almost all county and city taxes with ruthless disregard for all in the South Florida Community. They totally disregard consequences and moreover the manner of how the taxes are applied. They also forget the many times of the proposed tax and the abuses committed with promises unfulfilled . I will also mention that one of the biggest government tax abuse and mis-tax managed was endorsed by Herald Articles/Editorials of the Miami Marlin Stadium. I also remember the cover that the Miami Herald of some political figures of the past. Such as providing cover to probably the most inept and incapable Mayor that the country ever had, Mayor Carlos Alvarez. Also the same goes for ex County Manager Burgess .

I am tired of the Miami Herald endorsing all form of taxes and moreover without offering better solutions. I AM GOING TO LET MY MIAMI HERALD SUBSCRIPTION EXIPRE AND I WILL NOT RENEW IT AS A PURE BUSINESS DECISION. I will use this money to offset the cost of the news tax expenses that the Miami Herald has endorsed willy nilly .Such as the big toll increase at the Dolphin Express Way (i.e. $0.70), and now a new property tax add-on for the benefits of those that can afford pets. Also remember that property taxes are going up since property value has increase and the country will have a much larger tax income base this should allow to cover many others needies . Soon repairs to the Water System will cost Miami Dade County population much more than now. The entrance toll Key Biscayne is now set at $1.50 to fix a bridge where some of the most wealthy people live and while license plates and gas tax are paid for the same cost and repairs. Also don’t forget of the billions recently approved for schools and that also has to be paid in the way of more property taxes. Property owners you may be run out of your houses again .

The Miami Herald does not act as a conduit to better the community nor it provides better solutions. They simple endorse whatever some ill advice or uneducated politicians come up. I will react by not renewing my Miami Herald subscription and use the money to pay for some of the ignorant tax behavior. I will adjust other services as well as need be.